juicy

On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose those voters – and may indeed lose the election – if he does not cease his support of these atrocities.

Biden has that rare opportunity in politics: to help the country, and himself, by doing the right thing. But he must do so now. Both the Palestinian people and his own election prospects are running out of time.

While the prosecutor’s statement did not mention Israel, it was issued after Israeli and US officials have warned of consequences against the ICC if it issues arrest warrants over Israel’s war on Gaza.

While polls broadly show Biden continuing to fall behind former President Donald Trump in swing states across the country, they consistently show the older, whiter states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as the most competitive for Biden. Trump has larger leads in the Sun Belt states, in large part owing to Biden’s loss of support with younger voters and voters of color.

...

The most recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed Biden with smaller leads than 2020 among voters under 45 (3 points), Black voters (60 points) and Hispanic voters (13 points) — important voting blocs in the southern and western battlegrounds.

The United States on Tuesday rejected charges that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in its war against Hamas. 

“We don’t have any evidence of genocide being created,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee in a hearing.

Israel had a long history of friendship and cooperation with apartheid South Africa, and in addition to supplying millions of dollars worth of weapons to help violently suppress the country’s Black majority population, it also provided nuclear weapons materials and offered to sell the racist regime nuclear warheads to keep it in power. In return, Israel received uranium from South Africa to develop its weapons.

[P]erhaps the voters are sensible and the economists are obtuse. And perhaps the indicators on which economists rely no longer mean what economists suppose them to mean.

The Biden administration’s policy on Gaza has been widely criticised as being in disarray as the defense secretary described the situation as a “humanitarian catastrophe” the day after the state department declared Israel to be in compliance with international humanitarian law.

Washington was also on the defensive on Tuesday over its claim that a UN security council ceasefire resolution on which it abstained was non-binding, an interpretation that put the US at odds with other member states, international legal scholars and the UN itself.

Samir said most college-educated Afghans he knows, and those who worked in the country’s former government, don’t like Joe Biden because of how he handled the withdrawal of US troops in 2021. “They left us and our lives in danger,” he said.